Christopher and Columbus by Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

C >> Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim >> Christopher and Columbus

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27

As much as a man of habitually generous impulses could dislike, Mr.
Twist disliked Uncle Arthur. Patriotism was nothing at any time to Mr.
Twist compared to humanity, and Uncle Arthur's particular kind of
patriotism was very odious to him. To wreak it on these two poor aliens!
Mr. Twist had no words for it. They had been cut adrift at a tender age,
an age Mr. Twist, as a disciplined American son and brother, was unable
to regard unmoved, and packed off over the sea indifferent to what might
happen to them so long as Uncle Arthur knew nothing about it. Having
flung these kittens into the water to swim or drown, so long as he
didn't have to listen to their cries while they were doing it, Uncle
Arthur apparently cared nothing.

All Mr. Twist's chivalry, of which there was a great deal, rose up
within him at the thought of Uncle Arthur. He wanted to go and ask him
what he meant by such conduct, and earnestly inquire of him whether he
called himself a man; but as he knew he couldn't do this, being on a
ship heading for New York, he made up for it by taking as much care of
the ejected nieces as if he were an uncle himself,--but the right sort
of uncle, the sort you have in America, the sort that regards you as a
sacred and precious charge.

In his mind's eye Mr. Twist saw Uncle Arthur as a typical bullying,
red-necked Briton, with short side-whiskers. He pictured him under-sized
and heavy-footed, trudging home from golf through the soppy green fields
of England to his trembling household. He was quite disconcerted one day
to discover from something Anna-Rose said that he was a tall man, and
not fat at all, except in one place.

"Indeed," said Mr. Twist, hastily rearranging his mind's-eye view of
Uncle Arthur.

"He goes fat suddenly," said Anna-Felicitas, waking from one of her
dozes. "As though he had swallowed a bomb, and it had stuck when it got
to his waistcoat."

"If you can imagine it," added Anna-Rose politely, ready to explain and
describe further if required.

But Mr. Twist could imagine it. He readjusted his picture of Uncle
Arthur, and this time got him right,--the tall, not bad-looking man,
clean-shaven and with more hair a great deal than he, Mr. Twist, had. He
had thought of him as an old ruffian; he now perceived that he could be
hardly more than middle-aged and that Aunt Alice, a lady for whom he
felt an almost painful sympathy, had a lot more of Uncle Arthur to get
through before she was done.

"Yes," said Anna-Rose, accepting the word middle-aged as correct.
"Neither of his ends looks much older than yours do. He's aged in the
middle. That's the only place. Where the bomb is."

"I suppose that's why it's called middle-aged," said Anna-Felicitas
dreamily. "One middle-ages first, and from there it just spreads. It
must be queer," she added pensively, "to watch oneself gradually
rotting."

These were the sorts of observations, Mr. Twist felt, that might
prejudice his mother against the twins If they could be induced not to
say most of the things they did say when in her presence, he felt that
his house, of all houses in America, should be offered them as a refuge
whenever they were in need of one. But his mother was not, he feared,
very adaptable. In her house--it was legally his, but it never felt as
if it were--people adapted themselves to her. He doubted whether the
twins could or would. Their leading characteristic, he had observed, was
candour. They had no _savoir faire_. They seemed incapable of anything
but naturalness, and their particular type of naturalness was not one,
he was afraid, that his mother would understand.

She had not been out of her New England village, a place called briefly,
with American economy of time, Clark, for many years, and her ideal of
youthful femininity was still that which she had been herself. She had,
if unconsciously, tried to mould Mr. Twist also on these lines, in spite
of his being a boy, and owing to his extreme considerateness had not yet
discovered her want of success. For years, indeed, she had been
completely successful, and Mr. Twist arrived at and embarked on
adolescence with the manners and ways of thinking of a perfect lady.

Till he was nineteen he was educated at home, as it were at his mother's
knee, at any rate within reach of that sacred limb, and she had taught
him to reverence women; the reason given, or rather conveyed, being that
he had had and still was having a mother. Which he was never to forget.
In hours of temptation. In hours of danger. Mr. Twist, with his virginal
white mind, used to wonder when the hours of temptation and of danger
would begin, and rather wish, in the elegant leisure of his
half-holidays, that they soon would so that he might show how determined
he was to avoid them.

For the ten years from his father's death till he went to Harvard, he
lived with his mother and sister and was their assiduous attendant. His
mother took the loss of his father badly. She didn't get over it, as
widows sometimes do, and grow suddenly ten years younger. The sight of
her, so black and broken, of so daily recurring a patience, of such
frequent deliberate brightening for the sake of her children, kept Mr.
Twist, as he grew up, from those thoughts which sometimes occur to young
men and have to do with curves and dimples. He was too much absorbed by
his mother to think on such lines. He was flooded with reverence and
pity. Through her, all women were holy to him. They were all mothers,
either actual or to be--after, of course, the proper ceremonies. They
were all people for whom one leapt up and opened doors, placed chairs
out of draughts, and fetched black shawls. On warm spring days, when he
was about eighteen, he told himself earnestly that it would be a
profanity, a terrible secret sinning, to think amorously--yes, he
supposed the word was amorously--while there under his eyes, pervading
his days from breakfast to bedtime, was that mourning womanhood, that
lopped life, that example of brave doing without any hope or expectation
except what might be expected or hoped from heaven. His mother was
wonderful the way she bore things. There she was, with nothing left to
look forward to in the way of pleasures except the resurrection, yet
she did not complain.

But after he had been at Harvard a year a change came over Mr. Twist.
Not that he did not remain dutiful and affectionate, but he perceived
that it was possible to peep round the corners of his mother, the
rock-like corners that had so long jutted out between him and the view,
and on the other side there seemed to be quite a lot of interesting
things going on. He continued, however, only to eye most of them from
afar, and the nearest he got to temptation while at Harvard was to read
"Madame Bovary."

After Harvard he was put into an engineering firm, for the Twists only
had what would in English money be five thousand pounds a year, and
belonged therefore, taking dollars as the measure of standing instead of
birth, to the middle classes. Aunt Alice would have described such an
income as ample means; Mrs. Twist called it straitened circumstances,
and lived accordingly in a condition of perpetual self-sacrifice and
doings without. She had a car, but it was only a car, not a
Pierce-Arrow; and there was a bathroom to every bedroom, but there were
only six bedrooms; and the house stood on a hill and looked over the
most beautiful woods, but they were somebody else's woods. She felt, as
she beheld the lives of those of her neighbours she let her eyes rest
on, who were the millionaires dotted round about the charming environs
of Clark, that she was indeed a typical widow,--remote, unfriended,
melancholy, poor.

Mrs. Twist might feel poor, but she was certainly comfortable. It was
her daughter Edith's aim in life to secure for her the comfort and
leisure necessary for any grief that wishes to be thorough. The house
was run beautifully by Edith. There were three servants, of whom Edith
was one. She was the lady's maid, the head cook, and the family butler.
And Mr. Twist, till he went to Harvard, might be described as the
page-boy, and afterwards in his vacations as the odd man about the
house. Everything centred round their mother. She made a good deal of
work, because of being so anxious not to give trouble. She wouldn't get
out of the way of evil, but bleakly accepted it. She wouldn't get out of
a draught, but sat in it till one or other of her children remembered
they hadn't shut the door. When the inevitable cold was upon her and she
was lamentably coughing, she would mention the door for the first time,
and quietly say she hadn't liked to trouble them to shut it, they had
seemed so busy with their own affairs.

But after he had been in the engineering firm a little while, a further
change came over Mr. Twist. He was there to make money, more money, for
his mother. The first duty of an American male had descended on him. He
wished earnestly to fulfil it creditably, in spite of his own tastes
being so simple that his income of L5000--it was his, not his mother's,
but it didn't feel as if it were--would have been more than sufficient
for him. Out of engineering, then, was he to wrest all the things that
might comfort his mother. He embarked on his career with as determined
an expression on his mouth as so soft and friendly a mouth could be made
to take, and he hadn't been in it long before he passed out altogether
beyond the line of thinking his mother had laid down for him, and
definitely grew up.

The office was in New York, far enough away from Clark for him to be at
home only for the Sundays. His mother put him to board with her brother
Charles, a clergyman, the rector of the Church of Angelic Refreshment
at the back of Tenth Street, and the teapot out of which Uncle Charles
poured his tea at his hurried and uncomfortable meals--for he practised
the austerities and had no wife--dribbled at its spout. Hold it as
carefully as one might it dribbled at its spout, and added to the
confused appearance of the table by staining the cloth afresh every time
it was used.

Mr. Twist, who below the nose was nothing but kindliness and generosity,
his slightly weak chin, his lavishly-lipped mouth, being all amiability
and affection, above the nose was quite different. In the middle came
his nose, a nose that led him to improve himself, to read and meditate
the poets, to be tenacious in following after the noble; and above were
eyes in which simplicity sat side by side with appreciation; and above
these was the forehead like a dome; and behind this forehead were
inventions.

He had not been definitely aware that he was inventive till he came into
daily contact with Uncle Charles's teapot. In his boyhood he had often
fixed up little things for Edith,--she was three years older than he,
and was even then canning and preserving and ironing,--little
simplifications and alleviations of her labour; but they had been just
toys, things that had amused him to put together and that he forgot as
soon as they were done. But the teapot revealed to him clearly what his
forehead was there for. He would not and could not continue, being the
soul of considerateness, to spill tea on Uncle Charles's table-cloth at
every meal--they had tea at breakfast, and at luncheon, and at
supper--and if he were thirsty he spilled it several times at every
meal. For a long time he coaxed the teapot. He was thoughtful with it.
He handled it with the most delicate precision. He gave it time. He
never hurried it. He never filled it more than half full. And yet at the
end of every pouring, out came the same devastating dribble on to the
cloth.

Then he went out and bought another teapot, one of a different pattern,
with a curved spout instead of a straight one.

The same thing happened.

Then he went to Wanamaker's, and spent an hour in the teapot section
trying one pattern after the other, patiently pouring water, provided by
a tipped but languid and supercilious assistant, out of each different
make of teapot into cups.

They all dribbled.

Then Mr. Twist went home and sat down and thought. He thought and
thought, with his dome-like forehead resting on his long thin hand; and
what came out of his forehead at last, sprang out of it as complete in
every detail as Pallas Athene when she very similarly sprang, was that
now well-known object on every breakfast table, Twist's Non-Trickler
Teapot.

In five years Mr. Twist made a fortune out of the teapot. His mother
passed from her straitened circumstances to what she still would only
call a modest competence, but what in England would have been regarded
as wallowing in money. She left off being middle-class, and was received
into the lower upper-class, the upper part of this upper-class being
reserved for great names like Astor, Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. With
these Mrs. Twist could not compete. She would no doubt some day, for
Edward was only thirty and there were still coffee-pots; but what he was
able to add to the family income helped her for a time to bear the loss
of the elder Twist with less of bleakness in her resignation. It was as
though an east wind veered round for a brief space a little to the
south.

Being naturally, however, inclined to deprecation, when every other
reason for it was finally removed by her assiduous son she once more
sought out and firmly laid hold of the departed Twist, and hung her
cherished unhappiness up on him again as if he were a peg. When the
novelty of having a great many bedrooms instead of six, and a great deal
of food not to eat but to throw away, and ten times of everything else
instead of only once, began to wear off, Mrs. Twist drooped again, and
pulled the departed Twist out of the decent forgetfulness of the past,
and he once more came to dinner in the form of his favourite dishes, and
assisted in the family conversations by means of copious quotations from
his alleged utterances.

Mr. Twist's income was anything between sixty and seventy thousand
pounds a year by the time the war broke out. Having invented and
patented the simple device that kept the table-cloths of America, and
indeed of Europe, spotless, all he had to do was to receive his
percentages; sit still, in fact, and grow richer. But so much had he
changed since his adolescence that he preferred to stick to his
engineering and his office in New York rather than go home and be happy
with his mother.

She could not understand this behaviour in Edward. She understood his
behaviour still less when he went off to France in 1915, himself
equipping and giving the ambulance he drove.

For a year his absence, and the dangers he was running, divided Mrs.
Twist's sorrows into halves. Her position as a widow with an only son in
danger touched the imagination of Clark, and she was never so much
called upon as during this year. Now Edward was coming home for a rest,
and there was a subdued flutter about her, rather like the stirring of
the funeral plumes on the heads of hearse-horses.

While he was crossing the Atlantic and Red-Crossing the Twinklers--this
was one of Anna-Felicitas's epigrams and she tried Anna-Rose's patience
severely by asking her not once but several times whether she didn't
think it funny, whereas Anna-Rose disliked it from the first because of
the suggestion it contained that Mr. Twist regarded what he did for them
as works of mercy--while Mr. Twist was engaged in these activities, at
his home in Clark all the things Edith could think of that he used most
to like to eat were being got ready. There was an immense slaughtering
of chickens, and baking and churning. Edith, who being now the head
servant of many instead of three was more than double as hard-worked as
she used to be, was on her feet those last few days without stopping.
And she had to go and meet Edward in New York as well. Whether Mrs.
Twist feared that he might not come straight home or whether it was what
she said it was, that dear Edward must not be the only person on the
boat who had no one to meet him, is not certain; what is certain is that
when it came to the point, and Edith had to start, Mrs. Twist had
difficulty in maintaining her usual brightness.

Edith would be a whole day away, and perhaps a night if the _St. Luke_
got in late, for Clark is five hours' train journey from New York, and
during all that time Mrs. Twist would be uncared for. She thought Edith
surprisingly thoughtless to be so much pleased to go. She examined her
flat and sinewy form with disapproval when she came in hatted and booted
to say good-bye. No wonder nobody married Edith. And the money wouldn't
help her either now--she was too old. She had missed her chances, poor
thing.

Mrs. Twist forgot the young man there had been once, years before, when
Edward was still in the school room, who had almost married Edith. He
was a lusty and enterprising young man, who had come to Clark to stay
with a neighbour, and he had had nothing to do through a long vacation,
and had taken to dropping in at all hours and interrupting Edith in her
housekeeping; and Edith, even then completely flat but of a healthy
young uprightness and bright of eyes and hair, had gone silly and
forgotten how to cook, and had given her mother, who surely had enough
sorrows already, an attack of indigestion.

Mrs. Twist, however, had headed the young man off. Edith was too
necessary to her at that time. She could not possibly lose Edith. And
besides, the only way to avoid being a widow is not to marry. She told
herself that she could not bear the thought of poor Edith's running the
risk of an affliction similar to her own. If one hasn't a husband one
cannot lose him, Mrs. Twist clearly saw. If Edith married she would
certainly lose him unless he lost her. Marriage had only two solutions,
she explained to her silent daughter,--she would not, of course, discuss
with her that third one which America has so often flown to for solace
and relief,--only two, said Mrs. Twist, and they were that either one
died oneself, which wasn't exactly a happy thing, or the other one did.
It was only a question of time before one of the married was left alone
to mourn. Marriage began rosily no doubt, but it always ended black.
"And think of my having to see you like _this_" she said, with a gesture
indicating her sad dress.

Edith was intimidated; and the young man presently went away whistling.
He was the only one. Mrs. Twist had no more trouble. He passed entirely
from her mind; and as she looked at Edith dressed for going to meet
Edward in the clothes she went to church in on Sundays, she
unconsciously felt a faint contempt for a woman who had had so much time
to get married in and yet had never achieved it. She herself had been
married at twenty; and her hair even now, after all she had gone
through, was hardly more gray than Edith's.

"Your hat's crooked," she said, when Edith straightened herself after
bending down to kiss her good-bye; and then, after all unable to bear
the idea of being left alone while Edith, with that pleased face, went
off to New York to see Edward before she did, she asked her, if she
still had a minute to spare, to help her to the sofa, because she felt
faint.

"I expect the excitement has been too much for me," she murmured, lying
down and shutting her eyes; and Edith, disciplined in affection and
attentiveness, immediately took off her hat and settled down to getting
her mother well again in time for Edward.

Which is why nobody met Mr. Twist on his arrival in New York, and he
accordingly did things, as will be seen, which he mightn't otherwise
have done.

CHAPTER IX

When the _St. Luke_ was so near its journey's end that people were
packing up, and the word Nantucket was frequent in the scraps of talk
the twins heard, they woke up from the unworried condition of mind Mr.
Twist's kindness and the dreamy monotony of the days had produced in
them, and began to consider their prospects with more attention. This
attention soon resulted in anxiety. Anna-Rose showed hers by being
irritable. Anna-Felicitas didn't show hers at all.

It was all very well, so long as they were far away from America and
never quite sure that a submarine mightn't settle their future for them
once and for all, to feel big, vague, heroic things about a new life and
a new world and they two Twinklers going to conquer it; but when the new
world was really upon them, and the new life, with all the multitudinous
details that would have to be tackled, going to begin in a few hours,
their hearts became uneasy and sank within them. England hadn't liked
them. Suppose America didn't like them either? Uncle Arthur hadn't liked
them. Suppose Uncle Arthur's friends didn't like them either? Their
hearts sank to, and remained in, their boots.

Round Anna-Rose's waist, safely concealed beneath her skirt from what
Anna-Felicitas called the predatory instincts of their fellow-passengers,
was a chamois-leather bag containing their passports, a letter to the
bank where their L200 was, a letter to those friends of Uncle Arthur's
who were to be tried first, a letter to those other friends of his who
were to be the second line of defence supposing the first one failed,
and ten pounds in two L5 notes.

Uncle Arthur, grievously grumbling, and having previously used in bed
most of those vulgar words that made Aunt Alice so miserable, had given
Anna-Rose one of the L5 notes for the extra expenses of the journey
till, in New York, she should be able to draw on the L200, though what
expenses there could be for a couple of girls whose passage was paid
Uncle Arthur was damned, he alleged, if he knew; and Aunt Alice had
secretly added the other. This was all Anna-Rose's ready money, and it
would have to be changed into dollars before reaching New York so as to
be ready for emergencies on arrival. She judged from the growing
restlessness of the passengers that it would soon be time to go and
change it. How many dollars ought she to get?

Mr. Twist was absent, packing his things. She ought to have asked him
long ago, but they seemed so suddenly to have reached the end of their
journey. Only yesterday there was the same old limitless sea everywhere,
the same old feeling that they were never going to arrive. Now the waves
had all gone, and one could actually see land. The New World. The place
all their happiness or unhappiness would depend on.

She laid hold of Anna-Felicitas, who was walking about just as if she
had never been prostrate on a deck-chair in her life, and was going to
say something appropriate and encouraging on the Christopher and
Columbus lines; but Anna-Felicitas, who had been pondering the L5 notes
problem, wouldn't listen.

"A dollar," said Anna-Felicitas, worrying it out, "isn't like a
shilling or a mark, but on the other hand neither is it like a pound."

"No," said Anna-Rose, brought back to her immediate business.

"It's four times more than one, and five times less than the other,"
said Anna-Felicitas. "That's how you've got to count. That's what Aunt
Alice said."

"Yes. And then there's the exchange," said Anna-Rose, frowning. "As if
it wasn't complicated enough already, there's the exchange. Uncle Arthur
said we weren't to forget that."

Anna-Felicitas wanted to know what was meant by the exchange, and
Anna-Rose, unwilling to admit ignorance to Anna-Felicitas, who had to be
kept in her proper place, especially when one was just getting to
America and she might easily become above herself, said that it was
something that varied. ("The exchange, you know, varies," Uncle Arthur
had said when he gave her the L5 note. "You must keep your eye on the
variations." Anna-Rose was all eagerness to keep her eye on them, if
only she had known what and where they were. But one never asked
questions of Uncle Arthur. His answers, if one did, were confined to
expressions of anger and amazement that one didn't, at one's age,
already know.)

"Oh," said Anna-Felicitas, for a moment glancing at Anna-Rose out of the
corner of her eye, considerately not pressing her further.

"I wish Mr. Twist would come," said Anna-Rose uneasily, looking in the
direction he usually appeared from.

"We won't always have _him_" remarked Anna-Felicitas.

"I never said we would," said Anna-Rose shortly.

The young lady of the nails appeared at that moment in a hat so
gorgeous that the twins stopped dead to stare. She had a veil on and
white gloves, and looked as if she were going for a walk in Fifth Avenue
the very next minute.

"Perhaps we ought to be getting ready too," said Anna-Felicitas.

"Yes. I wish Mr. Twist would come--"

"Perhaps we'd better begin and practise not having Mr. Twist," said
Anna-Felicitas, as one who addresses nobody specially and means nothing
in particular.

"If anybody's got to practise that, it'll be you," said Anna-Rose.
"There'll be no one to roll you up in rugs now, remember. I won't."

"But I don't want to be rolled up in rugs," said Anna-Felicitas mildly.
"I shall be walking about New York."

"Oh, _you'll_ see," said Anna-Rose irritably.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27